I shot back, "Read tomorrow's Record, then decide if you want to close that case so fast. Because you'll either learn something about your own investigation, or everyone else will learn something that you're trying to hide."
That, I quickly realized, was a pretty stern accusation, and I scanned for a chance to backtrack. Too late. Stevens's cheeks suddenly flared red, and her angular features for the briefest of moments appeared severe.
"I'm not hiding anything," she said, her voice almost seething. "I'm not covering anything up. I'm not even closing cases. I'm investigating an assassination attempt on the president of the United States-trying to find out about a crime that could have changed the direction of the free world."
Dramatic, yes, but probably right. "I'm sorry," I said. "I am not implying that you are. What I'm saying is, I have some serious questions. You don't seem inclined to provide answers. That's your prerogative. But still, you expect me to help your cause."
"My cause is to solve a major crime. I thought you might want to help," she said.
I said nothing in return. I wasn't really in the mood to deliver a lecture on the role of the press and so forth, which, in this case, seemed to involve making sure the FBI was doing its job and not pulling one over on the public.
She, in turn, hesitated, again smoothing out her skirt in what I assumed was a nervous habit picked up in some all-girl's school, or as we'd say now, all-women's, even if they were only sixteen or seventeen years old. All around us, the pace of the room had picked up ever so slightly, as a well-dressed clientele flowed in to chat about the upcoming election-Washington's version of a Super Bowl for the wing-tip shoes and wire-rimmed glasses set.
"I'll be straight with you," Stevens said, leaning closer so that the people around us couldn't hear. "I wasn't aware that the Wyoming angle was being treated quite this seriously within the bureau. I had never heard of Mr. Walbin before your ditched story."
Finally, something of significance-an FBI agent admitting to a reporter that she has not been fully apprised of the important details of her own investigation-a presidential assassination attempt, no less. I struggled to conceal my shock. Then, of course, I began wondering if I was being snookered, by Drinker or by Stevens.
"Are you aware of any sort of tip that the bureau had received prior to the assassination attempt?" I asked.
"No."
There was silence. We were leaning close, causing me to wonder what people around us might be thinking-that perhaps we were a couple having a serious conversation about our relationship, or discussing having children, or changing jobs, or matters of divorce. She seemed more vulnerable than I had seen her before, and, I sensed, more vulnerable than she liked.
She asked, "Why did you pull that story?"
"The honest truth is, I wasn't sure if it was true."
"How sure are you on the Wyoming information?"
I replied, "It's out there. It's in circulation. I keep hearing about it, and because I keep hearing about it, I have to run with something on it, because if I don't, someone else will, and I really hate the meaninglessness of second place in the news business."
She considered that for a moment, then said, "I'll be straight again.
I'm hoping we might form some sort of relationship based on our mutual needs. I've never done this with a reporter before. But I've never been in an investigation where crucial facts were withheld from me."
"Have you approached Drinker or your direct superiors?" I asked.
"No. Not until I know more. I'm not playing from a position of ignorance anymore."
I liked that, this lack of blind loyalty, these street smarts. I said,
"You should read tomorrow's Record carefully and tell me what you think."
"What do you have?"
I shook my head. "Can't," I said.
"I have some theories on this case," she said. She stared at me, her mouth slightly open as if not sure whether to elaborate.
"As in?"
"I'm going to pursue them on my own," she said. "At some point, we may be able to help each other."
I said, "Do those theories involve Tommy Graham and Mick Wilkerson?"
"No," she said, without even a flicker of hesitation.
Stevens took a sip of her wine, locked her gaze on me, and said, "Looks like I've given you more than you've given me."
I caught the waiter's eye as he walked by, thinking it might be time to get a check, get out while I was ahead, as Stevens was kind enough to point out. When he came to the table, Stevens quickly said, "Another glass of the merlot, please." I caught myself and added, "And another Heineken for me."
"So you've been a reporter your entire adult life?" she asked, displaying her knowledge of me and offering to change the tone of the conversation. I didn't say anything, so she added, "I'm tired, and you look like hell. Why don't we just have a drink?"
There's that Dean Martin thing again, but it wasn't a bad idea. We sipped our beverages, we traded small talk about the newspaper business and the FBI and growing up in rural Indiana, as she did, as compared to South Boston, as I did. She told me she liked my house. I ordered a $19 shrimp cocktail and a $22 cheese and fruit plate, and could just about hear Peter Martin asking sarcastically, "What's this, two dollars a grape?"
Outside, she offered to drop me in Georgetown on the way to her Arlington condominium. Outside my house, she asked, "Could I use your bathroom?"
In the foyer, she knelt down on the floor, skirt and all, to give Baker an enormous hug and a kiss on his fluffy ears, telling him he was a wonderful boy all the while. In his excitement, the poor dog seemed ready to have a heart attack at the prospect of any company at this hour of the evening, let alone female.
"Don't you need to use the bathroom?" I asked finally as she stroked Baker's head with no apparent inclination to move.
She laughed and said, "No. I was just looking for an excuse to say hello to your dog. I absolutely adore him. Sorry."
We both smiled over that, and the telephone rang. It was about ten-thirty, and as I looked at the phone with a mix of longing and fear, she looked at me, amused.
"I'll just let that kick over to my answering service," I said.
"Deja vu," she said with a mischievous grin. "Are you a character in an Anne Tyler novel or something? Why don't you pick up the telephone?
A hot woman? An anonymous source? Maybe the president of the United States leaking to you again?"
She walked toward the telephone as I tried not to panic. Eternity seemed to descend on this living room, at least insofar as this ringing phone was concerned. It seemed as if it would ring forever. At last, she reached over and picked it up herself, saying in a playful voice,
"Flynn residence, may I help you?"
Then she looked at me blankly and slowly put the phone back on the hook. "Hung up," she said. "I must have scared her off."
twelve
Thursday, November 2
The dream was one of those hazy ones where the whole seems clearer than the sum of its parts. I remember realizing I was supposed to meet Katherine, but couldn't recall where or when or why. She wasn't at home and wasn't at work, and she didn't have her cell phone with her, so I sat at my desk in the bureau trying to figure out what time we said we would be getting together and where we were supposed to meet.
Then it struck me that maybe I couldn't reach her because she had gone to the hospital and had the baby. She hadn't called me because she wanted to surprise me with our new child. So maybe that's where we were supposed to gather, at Georgetown Hospital, in the maternity ward, to celebrate the most momentous day of our lives. So the real question was whether I should be angry at her for excluding me from our baby's birth or pleased that she was trying to make it a surprise.
Best I can remember, it was about here that the jagged sound smashed into my subconscious and stirred me into a state of semi-reality. At first I thought it was my alarm clock, but when I groped around my nightstand with a blind hand and shut it off, the sound kept fi
ring away at my brain. Then I realized it was the telephone, and it occurred to me that Katherine might be calling to say she was dining with her sister and wanted to know if I would like to meet them for dessert. To say the least, I was confused. The bedroom was completely black and cool outside my comforter, and I glanced at the illuminated clock and saw it was four-thirty in the morning, which only added to the fog.
When finally I found the phone on my night table, the familiar, haunting voice on the other end knocked the last remnants of fantasy from my brain and brought me back to a reality I wasn't sure I liked.
"You're a hard man to reach, Mr. Flynn," the anonymous source said in that even, dignified voice that had echoed in my mind so many times over the last week.
My wife is dead, I thought, suddenly burdened anew with a sadness that I had shed for my dream. Before I could say anything to this voice, even extend a greeting, he kept talking.
"You must be careful not to be misled. You must realize, you are being fed lies, lies that mask important truths that will someday astound you. You must keep working, keep digging, and get at these truths."
The world, or at least this conversation, was becoming clearer to me as the cobwebs gave way to the importance of the moment. I had prepared for this call in excruciating detail, actually thought of little but, and I knew I couldn't lose the opportunity because I was tired and grieving for my wife.
"That wasn't you who wanted to meet me at the Newseum, right?" I asked.
There was a moment of silence on the other end, and when he spoke, he sounded uncharacteristically flustered, his voice taking on a tone I had not heard from him before. "The Newseum? No, I don't understand."
This verified what Havlicek and I believed all along: that someone was trying to help me, even while someone else was trying to kill me.
I asked, "So you're saying you didn't have a note delivered to me at a restaurant Saturday night asking to meet you at the Newseum?"
"No."
I asked, "Then who would try to kill me?"
"Mr. Flynn, given the sensitivity of the information involved, there are people who will go to extremes to make sure it does not find its way into the public realm. There are people who would kill rather than see you get to the bottom of this story. I must warn you that if you continue to accept my help and pursue these leads, you are in danger.
Imminent danger."
I said, somewhat less than politely, "You haven't given me any leads yet, only general guidance. I need specifics. If I'm going to be in danger, you might as well give me more help. It's not enough to encourage me. You know more than I do. You know more than you're saying. I need you to tell me what you know, or at least to guide me along so I can get there."
"That's fair," he said. He paused, and beside me, the dog, his head on the edge of a pillow and his body spread out on the bed like a person, rolled partially over to look at me, then closed his eyes again. I sat up in the dark on one elbow. The light from the telephone handset cast a small glow on my bed.
"I'm prepared to help you," he said. "I'm prepared to bring you to the core of this situation. But it's crucial for you to understand, as we get further along, as you begin to realize what has happened with this assassination attempt, your own life will be threatened anew.
Knowledge is power. That axiom is true. But in this case, knowledge is also danger."
Obviously my Deep Throat had a flair for the dramatic, and I wondered, given the tone of his voice and the perfect sentences he formed, whether he had resumed reading from some sort of script. If he thought he was scaring me, he thought wrong, but I sensed he understood this.
The two most intriguing things you can say to any reporter worth the ink in his pen is that he may have to go to jail if he doesn't give up his source, and that his life is in danger. Best as I could understand at this early hour, he was offering me some version of a twofer.
"I've already accepted the danger," I said, finding myself speaking as theatrically as the source. "What I want is to get to the bottom of this story."
There was another long pause, and I thought I detected the shuffle of paper. I could hear him breathing softly into the telephone.
Finally, he said, "You've been to Chelsea, Massachusetts."
It seemed more of a declaration than a question, though I wasn't really sure, so I said, "Yes, I've been to Chelsea." And indeed I had. It's a tiny city of less than two square miles just over the Mystic River from Boston, jammed with decrepit slums and abandoned storefronts. It was the birthplace of Horatio Alger, a fact that had provided hope to waves of immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Ireland. Now that hope had turned into little more than despair for the Jamaicans and Mexicans who found themselves not in a job but in a cycle of poverty, their only refuge taken in an occasional puff of crack cocaine.
"You should travel there," he said. "You should find out everything you can about a man named Curtis Black. Learn about him, and you will have dug to the core of this case."
Chelsea. Curtis Black. The president of the United goddamned States of America. Silently, my finely honed reporting instincts were engaged in a full-blown war with my reverent tone toward this source. The instincts won, and I asked: "Just a casual question: what the hell does a Curtis Black in Chelsea, Massachusetts, have to do with an assassination attempt on the most powerful figure in the world?"
I thought this might anger him. Instead, he barely missed a beat.
"Everything," he said. "I've given you all I can right now. It's up to you to find out why."
I asked, "Will you continue to help me?"
"As long as you're working this, I'll help you," he said.
"Will you ever reveal yourself to me?" I asked that question just out of curiosity. I assumed a quick "No," but instead, he paused again and said, "Perhaps someday, if I think it will help."
I wasn't ready for this conversation to end quite yet, though I feared he was. I asked, more lightly, "Have you seen today's Record?"
"No, I haven't."
"We have two stories," I said. "We have a story saying the trigger man cannot be the same man the feds say he is. Their ID, this guy named Tony Clawson, has eyes of a different color from the corpse.
"The second story says that the FBI had a prior tip, confirmed by a federal informant, that a Wyoming-based militia group was plotting an attack on the president."
There was another long pause. The house was totally silent, outside of Baker's soft, rhythmic dog snoring. The clock showed 4:40 A.m. now. I thought I heard my source breathing more heavily.
"You have it about half right," he said, his tone slightly different, a little higher, with an edge, like a rubber band stretched thin.
"You're going to want to find out about Curtis Black even faster now."
He hesitated, then, sounding more compassionate than businesslike, added, "Just take care of yourself. Be careful." Then he hung up.
At seven-thirty in the morning at the Washington bureau of a big-city newspaper, I should have been a good two hours out from seeing another human being. Except for the lawyers along K Street who bill by the hour and equate time in the most literal sense to money, this is a town slow to start at the beginning of the day. Congressional aides, federal officials, and news reporters don't typically arrive at work until just on the northern side of 10:00 A.m. Once they're there, they tend to work late into the evening, often until 9:00 P.m. or after, and invariably, once they are out, they will complain vociferously about the number of hours they dedicate to their job, because in a city that produces little more than monotonous debate-no automobiles, mutual funds, not even insurance-long hours are the closest thing anyone has to show for any sense of accomplishment.
On this morning, at the far end of the otherwise darkened newsroom, Steve Havlicek sat hunched under a single light at his computer terminal, staring intently at the words on his screen.
"One question," I said as I approached quietly and roused him from some trancelike state. "What the fuck are you d
oing here at this hour?"
"You know, that whole early-to-bed, early-to-rise thing," he said, jovial as ever. "Big story here. We've got work to do and no time to waste. Howaya, slugger?"
I just shook my head. I was holding a bag with two toasted bagels and offered him one. He didn't hesitate in accepting, and was already biting into the second half before I even got mine unwrapped.
"These stories are going to catch fire today," he said, his mouth full.
"I've already got calls from the producers of Imus and the Gordon Liddy shows. When the boys over at CNN and Fox get in, they'll be all over us. This is officially hell day at the FBI."
Though Havlicek had done the lion's share of the work on the story of Clawson, he had given me a co-byline, partly out of professional courtesy, partly out of a raw shrewdness that my name might inspire the anonymous source to provide more help. Either way, it was the generous act of a very secure reporter.
I said, "Yeah, we have to start figuring out where we take this story next, though I suspect the reaction will give us a wild ride for the morning. What do you think the FBI is going to do?"
"They can't very well deny it," Havlicek said, looking at some point beyond me as he thought. "My bet is that they hole up over there at the Hoover Building and don't say a thing, or they simply say the investigation is continuing down many avenues."
"And the White House? I mean, Hutchins has to say something about this. This was an attempt to kill the bastard. He's got to weigh in with something stronger than he has full faith in the FBI."
"This will be a great day," Havlicek said. "Strap yourself in."
"Well, I've got something that might make it even greater. I got a call this morning from the anonymous one. The bastard woke me up at home at four-thirty."
Havlicek said, "Jesus Christ, you're burying the lead again. What did he say?"
I told him. I wove together the conversation about Chelsea and this guy named Curtis Black, and the source's kind words about our work so far. I told him of the danger he said we would face, of the shocking truths waiting to be uncovered. Havlicek was sitting in his chair just staring at me, his mouth agape, with, actually, some chewed-up bagel inside.
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